Measuring the garden and making a base map

After the stern ticking off she gave me about my winter abandonment, the garden has been more forgiving over the past few weeks. Even though what I have mostly done in her is read (currently reading my friend Paul Kingsnorth’s novel, The Wake) she has showered me with beneficence. It was snowdrops and hellebores first, then daffodils, now grape hyacinths and I strongly suspect there are some tulips on the way. Well, hello spring!

I took a break from the hard work of reading and mulling things over to measure the garden and draw up a base map. I am doing this so that I can properly design the garden, both aesthetically and working out where things are best placed (e.g. in the right amont of sun or close to the house for easy access). Before I started measuring I drew a sketch map to get an idea of what was in the garden and its size. It’s size really had me flummoxed. It’s really long and narrow (20m x 3.5m it turns out) and I just couldn’t seem to hold this shape in my head. I kept making it shorter and wider to fit more neatly on the page. I finally worked out that I needed to abandon my notebook, as any sketch map which was even close to the right shape would be far too small to add any detail, so I got a roll of brown paper and drew it on that. I then let the cats walk all over it to give it a suitable muddy, rustic effect.

When I came to measure, I wrote my measurements down from point to point – e.g. from back wall of house to outbuilding = 1.6m. I could have written them down on my sketch map (that would be more usual) but my sketch map was large and unwieldy and cat-tattered by that point, so I didn’t. It worked fine. I used string to measure the parts of the garden which were longer than my 5m rule, which also worked out fine. Fine that it except for my furry feline friends offering me ‘help.’ If I could offer you any advice concerning measuring your garden with string it would be this. INCARCERATE YOUR CATS. Put them in the house. Go on, do it now! As industrious as I was paying the string out, making a knot in it to mark the measurement and then collecting it carefully back in, Cirrus was more industrious. She chewed through that string like her life depended on it. Yes, the string broke when I tried to use it. Yes, it meant knotting it up and then doing some jazzy maths to make sure I counted the knotted bit in my measurements. Yes, the piece of string which I knotted was full of cat slobber. Lovely!

Once I had my measurements, I then drew my scale base map. I had measured in centimetres even though my heart belongs to inches (they’re such a friendly measurement). It’s almost impossible to use inches for scale drawings as they’re too big to fit on a page. Ask me how I know this… So, centimetres it was. I chose the scale of 1:25 which means that 1cm on my map equals 25cm (a quarter of a metre) in real life. That made my map 14cm wide and 80cm long. I had to stick three pieces of graph paper together to accommodate this, so my base map is the size and shape of a medieval manuscript. Such are the vagaries of scale.

I started by drawing in some of the main features first – the back of the house, the outhouse – and then found that I could use those to work out where to put the rest of the elements of the garden. So now I have a map of all of the immovable elements of the garden. It doesn’t include any plants, trees or garden furniture as I will use an overlay to add these (a posh way of saying I’ll draw these on some baking parchment which I’ll stick over the top). This means that I can keep the idea of the garden as a blank canvas in my head. It isn’t a blank canvas and I’ll probably keep most of the flowers which I described earlier, but I don’t want to let their placement influence my design.

About

Hi, I'm Beth. Welcome to The Seed - a lifestyle blog with mud on its boots. Everyday local food with a soupçon of hedgerow exoticism. A developing garden crammed with a rambling mess of food and flowers. Photographic love letters to nature. Things made and things mended. Talks with people of skill and the interest. Occasional farmyard forays. Quite a bit of swearing. And chard. Definitely lots of chard. Find out more

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Hi, I'm Beth. Welcome to The Seed - a lifestyle blog with mud on its boots. Everyday local food with a soupçon of hedgerow exoticism. A developing garden crammed with a rambling mess of food and flowers. Photographic love letters to nature. Things made and things mended. Talks with people of skill and the interest. Occasional farmyard forays. Quite a bit of swearing. And chard. Definitely lots of chard. Find out more